The interior of San Zenone, Verona, is lined with brick and stone,
arranged just as it is outside, and the effect is most satisfactory;
indeed, this and the interior of the baptistery at Cremona, still left
in their original state, shew how noble an effect of colour may be given
by brick internally, and how mistaken we are when we cover our walls
with undecorated plaster. I have seen it maintained by men who possibly
had never seen such old works as these in their old state, that such
colour as this is savage and fit only for uncultivated men. If, however,
there is refinement in whitewash or plaster, I am unable to see it, and
I can see no more inconsistency in honestly shewing the real materials
of the wall inside than in doing so outside. This at any rate is beyond
all doubt what these old Italian architects did.
[Illustration: WINDOW--VERONA.]
The east end of the church of the Frari at Venice is another example of
coursing with stone.[97] There, however, the courses are far apart, and
seem to be intended to define the lines of the springing of arches, of
transomes, and the like; and this they do very satisfactorily. But,
perhaps, the very best example of mixed stone and brick is that which we
have in the window-heads of the church by the side of the Duomo at
Verona,[98] in which the arrangement of the two colours is quite
perfect. In this case the cusped head of the light is executed in stone,
not in brick; and this is, I think, as a general rule, by far the better
plan; for if an attempt is made to execute tracery in brick, we have the
example of the Germans before our eyes as a warning. They rarely (S.
Katharine, Lübeck, is almost a solitary exception) used stone in their
window tracery; and as they never developed the kind of brick
plate-tracery which is so characteristic of the best Italian work, they
built windows which were either bald and ugly in their simplicity, or
else, endeavouring to execute elaborate traceries by the use of bricks,
moulded into the forms of component parts of tracery, they produced
what are even more distasteful than any other kind of window; in part
because they consist of an endless repetition of small reticulations,
and in part because they lead naturally to the constant reproduction of
the same window for economy’s sake.
[Illustration: BRICK WINDOW, SANT’ANDREA--MANTUA.]
There can be no doubt that the best windows for brick churches are
either those beautiful Italian developments of plate-tracery in which
all the bricks are carefully cut and rubbed for their proper place, or
those in which, within an inclosing arch of line upon line of brickwork,
a small portion of stone is used for the traceries. And this last has
the advantage of giving much more opportunity for variety of form and
beauty of effect than any brick traceries can ever give.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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